Category: Four pillars

Link spam

For the last week or so, I’ve noticed that I get the odd site linking to me that has nothing at all to do with the subject or tone of my blog. I guess link-spamming has been happening for a while and I’ve just been lucky so far.

Since I don’t actually display those that link to me, it probably doesn’t matter; on the other hand, it means that things like technorati rankings become less valuable as a result (unless technorati have some means of discounting such stuff).

I realise that any attempt to constrain or muzzle linking goes against the heart of what the internet is about: we should always ensure that anyone can set up a site and then link to other sites.

So I’m not looking for a solution to the problem; I’m just wondering whether this is common or whether we are seeing something new. My hunch is that link-spamming is more expensive than e-mail or comment spamming, since there has to be a site and a host; my hope is that these sites are fly-by-night and disappear as quickly as they arrive; I’d love to know what others think.

Four Pillars: Venezuela: One way to get people to think Opensource

I’m trying to get more information, but this story got my attention this morning.

I quote from the press release:

A program to train over 400 thousand people in open source software – as part of Mission Science – will start on Monday, June 12 in Venezuela. This training program will be carried out by the National Center of Information Technologies (CNTI, Spanish acronym). CNTI’s President, Jorge Berrizbeitia, explained that the first goal is to train the population that does not know anything about this field.

The registration process will be carried out in the 330 information offices distributed all around the country.

These free courses will last 24 hours. They will be completed according to the needs of each community. They include hardware and software fundamentals, their use and utilities, and the importance of information and communication technologies for communities.

Berrizbieta pointed out that 860 people will participate as teachers in these courses.

The CNTI’s head stated that the second stage of this program will train over 300 thousand reservists on this technology-information matter. He also added that the CNTI plans to open other 230 information offices. This institution also will provide mobile information offices that will be able to reach low-income communities of difficult access.

I’ve never come across any government doing this on a scale that is comparable. Training 400,000 people in the concepts and use of opensource software. With over 800 teachers. On a national scale. Specifically targeting low-income communities with poor access.

I have not looked at the curriculum or syllabus; I am not aware of how this is being funded; and it is difficult for me to tell how effective one day’s training will be.

But I applaud the move. I will definitely be tracking how they are doing. If anyone else is interested, please let me know via a comment.

Does anyone know of any other country where this is being attempted on such a scale?

Or, for that matter, any other organisation, public or private?

Four Pillars: Scoble moves on, and more musings on access

RageBoy brought this story to my attention, so hello and thanks to Boulder from Calcutta. Or Windsor, if you prefer.

The story itself was simple: Microsoft had done a deal with a couple of major universities to scan, and make available to all, a vast collection of out-of-copyright material. Given that the universities mentioned were the University of California and the University of Toronto, this could be a major deal. So I started investigating whatever I could find out.

And, almost in passing, I saw the Scoble story, which you can find here, with his comments here. Whatever opinions you may have about Robert Scoble, one thing is not in doubt. He helped change public opinion about Microsoft. Yes there are others: Kim Cameron and Ray Ozzie come immediately to mind, but the Scobleizer was the first to break ranks. In the early days of his blog, I must confess there wasn’t a day when I didn’t say to myself “Go get ’em Floyd” as I read his posts. So thanks and good luck to him, and to PodTech.net, the start-up he’s joining.

Back to the library cards story. It’s a difficult one for me to work out, because we’ve got denials and arguments even before we have clarity on exactly what’s been announced. So I’m going to write on the principles.

A vendor scans a whole pile of out-of-copyright materials and makes them available to the public. Fantastic. This could not have happened unless the “beneficial owner” of those out-of-copyright materials gave permission in the first place. Also fantastic.

What happens next? If someone else does a Google Book Search or an Amazon Look Inside or whatever else they call it, this is good. It’s called competition, should improve quality and reduce cost and make everything more accessible to more people.

So the next things to look at are access and cost. And on the surface everything is copacetic. Works with any browser. No digital walls to be seen anywhere. No implied or explicit costs.

Assuming these things don’t change, and we’re not witnessing some sort of freebie-hook-with-your-life-on-the-other-end-of-the-line, what else do I worry about? Simple. I need to understand the lock-in that doesn’t affect me today, but that will definitely affect me tomorrow.

A silo high-coupling between the browser/portal and the information. I expect to see a world where I can’t get to Google Book search output except via Google, Amazon Look Inside output except via Amazon and Windows Whatever except via Windows.

Today I can use Google to give me Amazon hits.

Tomorrow I need to be able to use Google and Firefox on a linux machine to give me Microsoft-Indexed-Books-Out-Of-Copyright-from-University-of-California. I don’t care how I get to the book, whether I have to click on a Google result to go to a Microsoft site to get it, or other means.

What matters to me is:

(a) no constraint on the browser or OS initiating the search request

(b) no constraint on the search engine initiating the search

(c) no need to provide any further login or identity credentials to get to the material

I am quite willing to credit the donor (University of California, if the story is true) and the scanner/indexer (Microsoft) whenever I use the material, but I want this process simplified as well.

So I look forward to finding out more. My gut feel is less charitable than I sound, even though I’ve tried to read this url on a Mac with Firefox and everything seemed to work.

So I will mull over leopards and spots.

Four Pillars: Because Of rather than With: A very provisional post

Yesterday my predecessor, Al-Noor Ramji, was quoted as saying that Google was BT’s “biggest threat”. You can find the story here. The reaction from many commentators was similar to that experienced by my colleague, Sean Park, when he went public with AmazonBay; they ranged from “you cannot be serious” through to “there’s some truth in it”, tending to stabilise around “you may be right, but you’re far too early with it”.

A few weeks ago, there was talk about the BBC being one of the few global brands with the credibility to take on the Googles and Yahoos and eBays and Amazons of this world.

Not that long ago, Jeff Jarvis was talking about Enabling versus Owning and its impact in this space, and, more recently, on the concept of Everybody’s a Network.

One context I could put all this into is that of Because Of rather than With, as propagated by Doc Searls. I’m also leaning heavily on his Making A New World essay in Open Sources 2.0 when I write this, where Stewart Brand’s ideas influence Doc’s thinking on infrastructure.

My take on all the foregoing is this:

Because Of and With are states, states in time.

Because Of is about being commoditised, becoming infrastructure. With is about being differentiated, standing out.

Everything transitions from With to Because Of.

Companies start off as being With, and over time become Because Of.

Departments within companies start off as being With, and over time become Because Of.

Technologies start off as being With, and over time become Because Of.

This is a very difficult transition. Our culture and expectations in a post-Taylor post-McLuhan world are all about being With. The pizazz, the oomph, the “it” factor, all of this is assumed as being in the With state.

So when you’re a With (whether a company or a department or a quango) you push back at forces that are trying to make you a Because Of. That is your instinct and your natural reaction. Everything you’ve been conditioned to wanting to be is in the With state. So you try very hard to avoid becoming a Because Of, using various forms of enforced lock-in to try and stop what is inexorable.

Because Of has pizazz and oomph as well; it’s just a different pizazz and oomph from that we experience as With. It is important that we don’t resist this pressure, there’s a big mutton-dressed-as-lamb risk there. When utilities fight to be not-utilities, unintended consequences occur. Such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

There’s a lot of innovation in Because Of, a lot of creativity in Because Of, a lot of money to be made in Because Of. Provided we don’t resist the pressure to become Because Of. A good Because Of can become a great Because Of. A good With cannot even stay a good With, much less become a great With. Commoditisation.

As everything disaggregates and democratises and globalises, the pace at which With becomes Because Of has increased. So the lock-in battles have become more urgent, more passionate, more emotional. That’s what Net Neutrality and IPR/DRM and content/conversation and and and are about. Things that used to be With resisting the forces that are making them Because Of. And failing.

When productive activity happens at the edge between networks of people, the With space for corporates, for public sector institutions, even governments, is contracting. Sharply.

The decline of With and the growth of Because Of is inextricably and recursively connected with information and with information technology.
And we have to Deal With It.

Today technorati and flickr and facebook and last.fm and bebo are With. Over time, those that remain will become Because Of.

Note: Blogging is provisional, as Doc says. These are my musings, my thoughts on what I see happening in the world of information, and nothing more. Snowballs.

Four Pillars: More musings on privacy; and why I’m confused

Have you ever had a McEnroe moment while reading something, a time when every nerve and sinew is yelling “You cannot be serious?“?

I used to feel that way when I read privacy-meets-security scaremongering; now I am so used to it I am more likely to laugh instead.

Take a look at this article in the latest New Scientist. Headlined Keep Out of MySpace, there’s nothing with the facts in the article, and a good deal of the analysis is sound, but how I wish the scaremongering would stop.

At least some of the quotes make me smile.  “I am continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves“. So says a chief security officer. What a surprise. “You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resume“. Same guy. Duh.

I must be stupid. Definitely Confused.

  • I think people post stories and notes and photographs and videos and comments on the web for a reason.
  • I think people post information on tastes and opinions and experiences on the web for a reason.
  • I think people post information on themselves and what makes them tick for a reason.

And funnily enough it’s the same reason.

They want other people to see the stuff. To read it, share it, comment on it, experience it, whatever.

If they wanted to prevent anyone from doing any of this they would not have posted or uploaded the stuff in the first place. If you want to keep something secret don’t tell anyone. As Kenny Dalglish famously said years ago.

There’s a huge difference between snooping and discovering. When someone looks through your dustbin and puts together a profile of your interests and weaknesses and things you didn’t mean to share with others, that’s invasion of privacy. When someone hacks into information you had reason to believe was private, that’s invasion of privacy. When someone collects information about what you do online without telling you what they’re doing, much less actually asking for your permission, that’s invasion of privacy. When someone finds things about you that you volunteered in the first place, and that you wanted others to find, that’s not invasion of privacy. That’s called success.

Of course it’s good to educate people as to what can be done with technology these days. To let people know how someone could build quite a detailed picture of who you are and what you do, just based on public domain information, including the stuff you volunteered. This we must do. Which is why articles like in the New Scientist can serve a purpose. But not by scaremongering.

I’ve heard people say that software akin to Riya is bad. If you speak to people who were desperately looking for loved ones in tragedies like 9/11 or Katrina or the tsunami or the earthquakes, they may give you a different answer. If you speak to people deeply interested in family tree research they may give you a different answer.

Social software has mushroomed because it allows people to share things. Not hide them.

The point is simple. Public information is not private information. Voluntarily publicised personal information is not private information. And there’s a lot of good we can do with the information.

It is wrong when the information was illegally obtained.

Today, even before the semantic web becomes everyday reality, even before things like Riya become mainstream, the ability to connect the dots is a privilege enjoyed by few. Governments and detective agencies and spies and terrorists and suchlike. This is wrong.

But rather than stop people publishing such stuff or scaring them, we need to educate people. Of the benefits as well as the risks. And we need to make access to the tools affordable and ubiquitous. In a weird kind of way akin to opensource and to encryption, all this sharing becomes more powerful when everyone has access. The problem with today is that very few have access, that the information they use is illegally obtained, or at the very least by subterfuge and deceit. That’s what’s wrong.

We need to stop the scaremongering. Educate on the risks. Build for affordability and ubiquity.

Otherwise we will have unintended consequences. Nanny states and nanny vendors and nanny consultants telling us that they need to implement Machiavellian DRM and “security” “for our own good”. While they have the tools to get beyond the protection. And we don’t.

Let’s not have privacy concepts built around the yesterdays of the West, but the tomorrows of the World.

I am not advocating an absence of privacy, it is everyone’s right. There are many things that can and should remain private. What I am advocating is a constructive and holistic attitude to privacy, one that does not enforce the implementation of bad DRM and InfoSec in the name of privacy.

Otherwise we will have created a two-tier personal information universe with a powerful few having access to the connections. Now that’s Big Brother.

For those who are interested, I’ve provided links to two of the publications referenced in the article. The first is a report on Data Mining and Homeland Security, you can get to the Report via this article. The second is a paper that was presented at WWW2006, on Semantic Analytics of Social Networks.

Sure we’re going to learn more about who we are and what we do and who else feels that way; sure there’s a wealth of information just waiting to be found, patterns we can’t see today, relationships we don’t know about, interests we didn’t know we could have. It’s a voyage of discovery, one that must be available to all rather than a select few.